The Language of Baklava

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  Each night, Fattoush wakes after a few hours of sleep, wanders into the living room, and sprawls on the hard couch that smells like the inside of an old elevator. He watches whatever he can get on Jordanian TV at three-thirty a.m., and we find him asleep there in the morning, static rolling across the TV screen. Then my father makes him a plate of what he calls special wake-up eggs, over easy fried in butter with chili paste, which Fattoush eats propped up on the couch, slightly flushed and damp skinned.

  After that, they dress and one or another of my uncles arrives and whisks them off for another roundelay of lunch and visits. Even though I’ve assured him this isn’t necessary, Fattoush appears to have no objection to spending his days in the company of my sixty- and seventy-year-old uncles. I’m exhausted by the parties myself and will usually opt out in order to stay home and stare at the yellowing notes of my unwritten novel.

  That’s on the sunny days. But it’s December, the wintry season, when rain and sleet will suddenly plummet from the sky. On such days, the uncles like to be received at my apartment, which they’ve started referring to as “Ghassan’s house.” They wedge themselves into the punitive, hard-seated, chrome-legged chairs that came with the place—twenty-two chairs that my landlord had arranged in a big, tight circle around the perimeter of the living room, the chrome gleaming like a grin—and the one dust-spewing, sprung-shot couch against the wall.

  The brothers crowd me out of the living room with their thunder-wheezing laughter, their curling gray worms of cigarette ash, and their wild-horse eyes. I have a few friends who know to come over on these rainy days of uncles. We set up the bootleg version of Monopoly on the dining room table. Fattoush wafts away from the uncles, attracted by the cinnamon skin and topaz eyes of my friend Mai. Mai’s friend Dabir also comes along. Dabir is twenty-four, droll, bored, irritated, and probably gay and likes to be called Dobby. He cradles his chin in his palm and watches, intrigued by Fattoush’s helpless enchantment with Mai. Fattoush pulls out a chair for Mai, scrupulous as a flight attendant, and asks if he can bring her anything. Dobby says, “I’d love a ginger ale.” But Mai just smiles archly and shakes her head, so Fattoush floats down into the seat beside her.

  In my apartment, with its windows open to the city soot and desert air, if I don’t dust every morning, the furniture will be shrouded in a gray film by noon. The game board slides around in the tabletop dust that has gathered there since the last dusting a few hours ago. I purchased the Monopoly game at the souk in Aqaba. While the board looks the same, the place names are all Jordanian, switching Amman for Atlantic City, Shmeisani Circle for Reading Railroad, the Cave of Sleepers for Broadway. Dobby translates the community chest cards, which are filled with legalese that seems to have been written by someone playing another game. The cards demand things like “Restitution in three parts of 200 dinars to the offending party for trespass on Abdoun Way,” or “10 dunams of land payable to the Master of the Port of Aqaba.”

  Mai, who works in a royalty-funded environmental conservation office, refuses to translate because she says that Monopoly is yet another bourgeois capitalist West-centric scheme. That doesn’t stop her from playing, however. In fact, she uses the game as a method of flirting with Fattoush. Honeying her voice and lowering her lashes, she says, “Mmm, you think you’ve caught me, you devil. I’m not afraid of you,” as she tosses a few funny-money dinars of baksheesh at him.

  The tips of Fattoush’s ears turn scarlet. Thrilled and stupefied by the unexpected flirtation, he refuses to take money from her, legal or not. “How could I expect payment from one so lovely?” he asks. “Here, take some houses,” he says, pushing the little game pieces at her.

  Dobby pouts and fumes that they’re not playing fair. “Man, this is totally outrageous,” he says in his mellifluous voice. Dobby attended two years of design school in London, which seems to have instilled in him a heightened sense of irony and impatience toward Jordan and his life here. He shoves himself out of the chair, slides through a crack in the uncles’ circle of chairs, snaps up a tan cigarette from one of the packs on my coffee table, and returns already smoking. He clicks his head back in the uncles’ direction. “What are all those fat boys doing in there?” he grumbles. “My God.”

  But Fattoush isn’t answering. His chin is propped on his fist as he drifts in a waking dream of Mai.

  I am limited to playing in distracted little bouts, perpetually on call to bring my father and his brothers cookies, coffee, nuts, pressed apricots, nougat, seeds, and oranges. The Jordanian rains thunder against my windows and turn them waxy and veined. When it builds into hailstones, I go to the windows and row in the long, oarlike metal poles attached to massive iron shutters. They close out all daylight and some of the wind, and the stones roar against them like the Last Judgment. After the hail, phone lines won’t work and sometimes the electricity all over town goes out. The drivers are transformed as they ease their way beneath dead traffic lights, roll down their windows to wave one another ahead, or offer lifts to soaked pedestrians.

  It’s crowded, but the uncles are happy here at their brother’s house. It’s like a snow day for them. Their own children and grandchildren are cooped up back home. Here, they can gossip with abandon, smoke cigarettes, and eat everything that their wives don’t let them eat—pastries, candied chickpeas, Turkish delight, sweetened milk with rosewater, ice cream. They present these items wrapped up in pink and silver papers like house gifts to me at the door; I in turn am to present them in attractive bowls. Then they eat whatever they brought. They smoke, balancing the cigarettes between their second and third fingers in the same hands they use to lift demitasses of sugar-spiked black Arabic coffee. They sit with one knee crossed over the other, their feet bouncing with caffeine.

  My uncles open with the usual bad-tempered political debates about Israel and Palestine, nuclear weapons, Israel and Lebanon, Saddam Hussein, Saudi Arabia, too much oil, not enough oil. There are no solutions to any of these problems, only opinions and grief and exasperation with the world, the terrible world—which is code for America—where nobody will listen to them and nobody asks for their opinion. Why is it, they wonder, that America gets fatter, that American TV shows get louder, and that TV contestants win millions with a single answer, while the rest of the world gets leaner, hungrier, sicker, angrier? Can this be right? What can be done? Gradually these frustrations make way for intimate revelations about their own disappointments. Frequently their confessions have to do with the way their children are turning out and all the unsatisfactory people they are always finding to marry.

  “He could have been a prince! I told him so—a goddamn prince! And then he had to go and get an art degree. . . .”

  “I told her fifty thousand times: Don’t marry that bum. And did she listen? What do you think?”

  “What the hell does anyone do with a so-called art degree? Is he going to eat the art? Is he going to feed it to his family?”

  “I said, That bum doesn’t know how to comb his own hair, you think he knows how to get married and raise babies?”

  Outside, the drumming rains soften to a sizzle, then silence. We crack open the shutters. There’s a wash of sun that turns the streets as gold as something ripe. The call to prayers rises from just behind the city horizon and whitens the sky.

  “It’s time!” Uncle Frankie says. He snaps on the TV and there it is—The Bold and the Beautiful, a TV show that I wouldn’t have glanced at in the States. Now, however, I know the theme music by heart. I know the names of all the characters, the actors, the writers, the producers. I know where it was shot.

  My Russian-made TV is propped up on four pointy stilt legs. It hums as the ardent theme music swells up in a burst of static. The uncles murmur their approval and lean in toward the screen. The American soap opera, with its thieving patriarchs, lazy, weak sons, and conniving, vindictive matriarchs, pleases the Jordanians. After Baywatch, The Bold and the Beautiful is one of the most popular shows in the Arab world. This is how Ame
rica represents itself in other countries: cheesy programming, soap operas, and canceled shows. Selling off bad jokes, one-dimensional characters in skimpy clothes, and flimsy stories is a quick way to run a profit. And of course, when everyone tunes in to The Bold and the Beautiful at four, they assume they are watching life in America.

  “What is that Ridge up to now?” says Uncle Hal, indicating a cleftchinned man lurking in some shrubbery. “Why is he fooling with the bushes?”

  “He is a bad son,” says Uncle Frankie. “God save me from a son like this.”

  “But you can’t blame him, considering what Eric and Grant and that Brooke did to him,” says Uncle Hal.

  “He will come to no good,” intones Uncle Jimmy.

  “Never mind about all this psychology,” says Uncle Jack. “Ridge is this way because of the Gypsy curse.”

  “What Gypsy curse?” Uncle Hal says.

  “Quiet!” Dobby scolds. “I can’t hear a word, you people.”

  Eventually the show draws to another cliff-hanging close. Breathlessly spoken promises and threats trail off in midair, lips tighten, and eyes narrow. After chattering through the whole program, the uncles sink back in their seats and fall into a postchurch trance. They sigh and drink down to the thick dregs of their coffee. The last rain puddles have vaporized in the streets. We push the heavy shutters all the way open on their iron poles, and the city is steaming with fiery mist.

  The uncles brush off their trousers, mutter, and begin preparation for the grown-up business of getting home for dinner. They revert to their older, heavier, and more serious selves. The remains of an afternoon of snacking and complaining are dusted onto my floor and furniture cushions.

  Mai abruptly stands to go as well. Caught off guard, Fattoush stumbles to his feet, his chair dancing backward. He pats at his pockets, asking if he can have her number and wondering if she’d like to get a drink sometime, just the two of them. His hands search up and down the front of his shirt for a pen. But Mai, who’d been twirling her hair, pouting, and saying things all afternoon like “You want your big bad rent money, handsome, you’ll have to come over here and get it!” has returned to her usual reserved, good-Arab-girl self now that the Monopoly game is back in the box. She pulls back and gives him a look as cool as a splash of water. He follows her, astonished, all the way to the door, which she closes with a crisp click behind her.

  Dobby, who works in the same office as Mai and has known her, as he says, since before he was born, scrutinizes Fattoush, who is still standing with one hand frozen on the doorknob. He turns and mumbles to me, “This Fattoush has a lot to learn.”

  After a long string of sighs, Fattoush goes outside to smoke Jordanian cigarettes. Dobby stays behind and helps me wash the dishes.

  THE UNCLES’ FAVORITE MEZZA PLATTER

  Reminiscent of Spanish tapas, a mezza course is designed to

  stimulate hunger, not satisfy it. It provides the segue from greeting

  the arriving guests to the full-scale meal. So be careful to strike a

  balance: Tease the palate with little tastes and simple, small dishes,

  and don’t let anyone spoil his or her appetite! Certain dishes are

  perennial favorites for a mezza, though all cooks have preferred

  selections and may decide to rotate in new ones to keep their guests

  alert. Here are a few of the classics:

  I am known to the night, the desert, and to horses.

  —al-Mutanabbi

  We roll down the windows of our big rented Jeep as the four of us— Bud, Fattoush, Mai, and I—make ourselves known to the night. The desert air sways around us, and the stars crack and craze the sky overhead. On the desert highway, we pass the muted shapes of Bedouins, of restless horses, of drifting, swan-necked camels. It is one of the nights that I walk past all the refracting mirrors of homesickness, disorientation, loss, and see myself in place.

  We approach the little hillside village of Yehdoudeh, but the Bedouins who work the lower portions of the field are already asleep or moodily sipping their black coffee in the dark. They sit on goat-hair blankets on the ground, gazing into the middle distance, their small lamps glowing on the hill like fireflies. There are far fewer Bedouins than there used to be, as cars and trains and modernity have crowded them out—and the Bedu’s hillside is darker than it used to be. There is a suggestion of hidden, grazing animals. We wind our way up and around in the dusty Jeep. Yehdoudeh—fertile, ancient, and remote as the moon—is one of my father’s ancestral places.

  At the top of the hill is a walled city that was occupied by the Abu-Jabers generations ago. The fortress has been divided into apartments and summer homes. Some people call it the Abu-Jaber castle, but my mother wryly refers to it as “the compound.” In Arabic, they call it Khirbet Abu-Jaber, literally “the Abu-Jaber Ruins,” and it’s hard not to hear this name as a comment on the family itself. The place is huge and labyrinthine, with stone floors and walls and remote medieval windows whose light comes through in shards. I feel I could walk into these high, crumbling walls and never be found again. Voices echo and shuffle and drip or burst out loudly from unexpected places. There is nothing more pensive than looking out from these terraces. Before me stretch miles of plains, desert, and scattered village lights. Beyond that are the unlit corners of the world.

  Flinty, bone white roads bearing the names of my ancestors wend across the hill. I haven’t been back here since my childhood, when we made special excursions from Amman to “the country.” The country was where we’d find my tall great-granduncle, the sheikh. He was a magnificent man, poised and stately as an old tree, who still wore his Bedouin robes and sword. I reflect on the marvelous day years ago when we drove to the country and all ate together in the Bedouin manner, standing in a circle about a platter of food. The sheikh lived out of walls with his tribe in the hilly land behind the fortress, and he would point at the fortress and say, “That was where we kept the horses.”

  But even though the fortress is so adamant and venerable, and time itself seems distilled, hanging like a humidity in the air here, something is different since I last saw the place twenty-five years ago. The four of us begin wandering its enclosed pathways, its hulking pale rock walls and polished stone floors. The air is moist and cool inside, though we’re surrounded by arid land. In the open courtyards, the night has a pure lilac cast. The rooms swim with tea-colored light shed by brass lamps suspended on chains, and the walls are covered with tapestries that shimmer with arch-backed dogs and gazelles. It is a grand, spectral place.

  Bud steps into an empty stone chamber made sapphire from the filtered light of two lamps. It’s like a private chapel. He turns toward the lanterns and the slope of his back seems softened with an irreducible longing. He looks back, hands open like someone in prayer, and says to me: “You see? This is what I’ve been talking about.”

  We leave the room and walk together in a clutch, listening to our footsteps echo. I think again: Something is different here. We turn a corner and the sudden glow of electric lights is jarring, too yellow. I squint, momentarily dazed, my fingers shielding my eyes.

  “Is that a shopping mall?” asks Fattoush, his voice struck halfway between hope and disbelief.

  I lower my hand. It is. It’s a corridor filled with old-timey desert craft shoppes filled with possibly authentic crafts like embroidered dresses, glass bottles layered with colored sands, and mosaic-etched china. There are T-shirts that say, “I ♥ King Hussein,” and “I Kiss Camels,” as well as plastic key chains, porcelain figurines, and coin purses embossed with amulets against the evil eye. Curious, we turn down a short flight of steps and discover that the lower level is occupied by a glassblowing operation selling earrings, bracelets, tumblers, and bowls. We watch a sweat-soaked glassblower operate an enormous bellows and raise the temperature in the room to scorching. The currents of heat fan us back up the stairs.

  “Where did all this come from?” Bud asks. “No one told me about these
stores before. . . .”

  “This is too perfect,” says Fattoush.

  “Well, there’s no escaping Western capitalization,” Mai says. “Viva American-style democracy! Viva commercial exploitation!”

  Fattoush buys a stuffed camel with spinning, heart-shaped eyes and gives it to Mai, who gazes at it in dismay and manages to bury all but its crazy head in her purse.

  We poke along the collection of shops, stroking shawls, twirling mobiles, and reading T-shirts. Around another corner, we see a huge red-and-blue canvas tent is set up inside on the stone floor.

  “Well, well, well,” Bud breathes. His eyes are intent, his nostrils flare.

  He moves toward the tent with his hands out and open as if he is about to start flying, and the rest of us follow. I realize as we approach that the red tent is actually an elaborate entryway leading into a vast, open courtyard full of tables and people.

  It’s a restaurant.

  “Kan Zaman,” Fattoush reads the English half of the English/ Arabic sign hung over the interior doorway. “What does that mean?”

  “Once upon a time,” Mai says, a beat of irony stringing out her words.

  Bud echoes her, his eyes raised.

  It is the restaurant of restaurants, here in the heart of the heart of Abu-Jaber country. On exactly the spot, I later learn, where long ago the family kept the horse stables.